Explore Quotes by Cass Sunstein

They call soccer the beautiful game, but if I had to identify just one sport to show members of some alien species what the human race is all about, I'd nominate squash.

Research shows that if people are talking and listening to like-minded others, they become more dogmatic, more unified, and more extreme. Personalized Facebook experiences are a breeding ground for misunderstanding and miscommunication across political lines and, ultimately, for extremism.

Like a bank run, a decline in stock prices creates its own momentum.

I love Richard Thaler's 'Quasi Rational Economics.' A collection of some of his most interesting and inventive essays, the real foundation of behavioral economics.

Every human being has an assortment of diverse identities, and it greatly matters which one is triggered by social situations, which hold up different kinds of mirrors. The same is true for nations.

If the air quality is terrible in Los Angeles, if a particular university is unusually expensive, if crime is on the rise in Dallas, or if a company has a lot of recalled toys, transparency can spur change. Whenever public or private institutions have to answer to the public, their performance is likely to improve.

It can be easy and tempting, especially during a presidential campaign, to listen only to opinions that mirror and fortify one's own. That's not ideal, because it eliminates learning and makes it impossible for people to understand what they dismiss as 'the other side.'

One lesson is that if you want to predict voter turnout, you should ask whether at least one candidate is attracting high levels of enthusiasm - not whether the stakes are high, or even perceived to be high. That fits the historical pattern.

Donald Trump has taken a battering ram to longstanding political norms - the unwritten conventions that make governance possible. But even before he decided to run for president, those norms were under assault.

Interviewers actively fool themselves, finding ways to learn from interviews even if there's actually nothing there to learn from.

If I may discuss the idea of explosion. The number of regulations issued in the last two years is approximately the same as the number issued in the last two years of the Bush administration.

When I was an academic, I'd sometimes get a little feeling of excitement when I had an idea that was, I hoped, fresh. And whether anyone should act on that idea is a very different question.

I am a huge Red Sox fan.

Behavioral scientists distinguish between fast thinking and slow thinking. Fast thinking is represented in the mind's System 1: it is automatic, intuitive, and often emotional. Slow thinking, reflected in System 2, is deliberative and reflective; it likes statistics. It's hard to think of a purer System 1 candidate than Trump.

In government, you're not a writer, you're an administrator.

If you have an architecture of control, let's say, where you select in advance everything that's going to affect your life, then you're going to live in a very small world that will have an echo chamber feature... Pandora, which I love, actually feeds into that.

Donald Trump promises to impose, soon after his inauguration, a new requirement on federal agencies: If they want to issue a new regulation, they have to rescind two regulations that are now on the books. The idea of 'one in, two out' has rhetorical appeal, but it's going to be extremely hard to pull off.

There's a big difference between the role of an academic and the role of someone in government. That's a cliche, but in academic life if you say things that are common sense and people nod their heads, it's not very useful. You're not adding anything.

It's one thing to make financial aid available to students so they can attend college. It's another thing to design forms that students can actually fill out.

The U.S. is an optimistic nation. No candidate has ever won the American presidency by speaking primarily to people's deepest fears and by manufacturing a sense of apocalypse - that our leaders 'can't do anything right,' that things are utterly falling apart.

When President Barack Obama is trying to persuade Americans not to do something, he has a go-to line: 'That's not who we are.' Whether the issue involves discrimination, immigration, torture, criminal violence or health care, he invokes the nation's very identity.